The other day, I realised something about this new market of fintech, in which banks are becoming financial systems integrators. This realisation was that banks really should think about what they are doing, as they race ahead developing so much of their core capabilities internally. Right now, coders are the new rock stars, and banks develop pretty much everything themselves – I can think of hardly any Tier 1 banks that have not developed their own core systems.
Most banks are proud of this fact. For example, one of my top statistics is that UK-based bank HSBC has more developers than software multinational Microsoft. Microsoft employed 1000 developers to produce its operating system, Windows 7. The average mid-size regional bank is employing more than double this number while the average major global bank is employing more than 10 times this amount. Last time I looked, HSBC had more than 13,000 developers.
